Recording equipment for various types of media, such as video, audio or both, have been a target of intensive research and development in the last decades. In the field of video recording, camcorders are available at very competitive prices to large parts of the population. Digital camcorders have attained a dominant market share, most likely due to their easy handling, low operating cost, and/or their ability to be connected a general purpose computing device, such as a personal computer or a notebook. Transferring recorded media data items to a personal computer (PC) offers a relatively comfortable and economic possibility to store, manage, and edit the recorded media data items to both professional users and amateurs. While basic editing tasks are typically easy to accomplish even for amateurs, more elaborate, artistic effects tend to require profound knowledge about video and/or audio editing techniques. Basic editing tasks may comprise selecting specific sections from one or several recorded media data items and combining the selected sections in a user-defined sequence to form a new media data item. Other editing tasks may involve applying an effect to one media data item (video, image, or graphic) and a background, wherein the background may be a pre-defined background, a user-defined background, or simply an empty screen. The more elaborate editing tasks may comprise arranging two or more media data items to be presented substantially simultaneously, such as a split screen effect or a picture-in-picture effect, or multitrack editing tasks in general.
To do single-track editing or multitrack editing—especially complex picture-in-picture effects with moving path animations on different tracks—is a time-consuming task for almost any type of user. The only option for achieving professional looking picture-in-picture (PiP) effects right now appears to involve a substantially manual configuration. This means that the user typically has to create a complex overlay project on several tracks. For each media data item or “clip” that the user wishes to use, the user typically needs to define the layer priority, a mark-in instant, a mark-out instant, a time related to the overall project and the relative timings of clips to be used within the PiP sequence. Furthermore, the user typically needs to adjust size, position, shadow, etc. via keyframes for each individual clip and the individual positions in the clips that the user wants to make use of within a PiP video sequence.